


The Nut She Could Not Crack

by DinosaurTheology



Category: Star vs. The Forces Of Evil
Genre: Angst, Constructed Reality, Dreams vs. Reality, Emotional Hurt, F/M, Female Friendship, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Illusions, Magic, Male-Female Friendship, Monsters, Witch Curses, Worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-22
Updated: 2016-11-22
Packaged: 2018-09-01 11:09:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8622253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DinosaurTheology/pseuds/DinosaurTheology
Summary: When Star, Marco and Janna play with a Ouija Board (it's sort of like a Mewni Board with design flaws) something comes out of her secrets closet to play. As one might expect, it does not play nicely, and some nuts do not crack easily.





	

**Author's Note:**

> SVTFOE is created by Daron Nefcy and is kewl. After BonBon the Birthday Clown I felt like exploring the dark side of Star's magic and family a little bit more, and took a little more inspiration from the fantastic meditation on magical girls that is Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

Down.

Dip down.

That's how you do it, how you go deep against the monsters and other, more sinister forces in the universe, the so-called "forces of evil." But... are they? Star blinks, in the depths, and wonders if it's all been just a huge misunderstanding, the war between her people and the monsters, dating back to the time when Solaria had raged with a face like lightning and earned the epithet "Monster Carver" with her flaming sword.

Dip.

Down.

Star can't find herself in the magic. It flows into and out of her, from the matrix of elemental gunk that makes up the universe. Glossaryk explained it, once. "Your wand," he said, "functions from memory."

"Memory?" she'd said. "Howzat, again?"

"All reality is memory," he told her. "What you remember is what is real, after all, and grows in power as you convince others to remember it the same way. Your wand," and here he taps the tip with his long, slender blue finger, "is a key for unlocking that power of memory. You craft the memories of the past, present and future into an illusion so real that it becomes becomes more than the original reality and supplants it, so real that it is beyond fake."

"Like the Hole song?"

He glowered. "Not like the Hole song."

"D'aww, but you know you love you some Courtney Love."

"I do! But just remember," he said, "you use your memories, through the wand, to create memories in others and, so, to create the past that will influence their present and determine their futures. It's an enormous power and it's all yours."

"Um, er..." She'd stammered, here, and thought a long moment. "Mostly I just shoot narhwals at people."

"And where do they come from? Why do those people experience something as freaky-nasty as a narwhal flying at them?"

"Cuz narwhals are cool?"

He'd explained a lot more, at that point, but honestly Star had lost interest by then. She'd sung a little song about eating some sweet, sweet goblin dogs in her head, imagined it flapping around on butterfly wings, and then sent octopuses (octopi?) with helicopter blades chasing it around the room.

Now? She sorta wishes she'd listened to him.

Deep. Dip down, dip down.

Deep.

This monster is not like any other that she's encountered, or so she thinks at least. It's hard to think straight. She remembers so little, anymore, in the labyrinth created by its concentrated field of dark gravity. Arms that might be hers, or might belong to the monster, hang from her shoulders. Knees that could be the monster's, or maybe not, buckle under the pressure of it. The world is the monster, and it is the world. She is, and is not, herself a part of it.

It calls itself Hexenuss and is a creature made from lost scraps of magic welded into something original and awful and aware. It is aware, not just one of the magical storms that can rip across lost dimensions in the multiverse when too much power has been discharged on the cosmic wind, and grew from the disparate threads of the timeline when she went into her wand.

She is Star, not Hexenuss. Star, she tells herself, Star. I'm Star Butterfly, daughter of Queen Moon the Undaunted. I will not, am not, cannot be Hexenuss. I do not dance across the realms of life and death with an atomic breeze fluttering through my hair. I am Star Butterfly, grand-daughter of Eclipsa the Queen of Darkness, and thought the darkness might brush my cheeks I do not live within it. I am not its creature.

But... am I? She blinks, struggles with the notion that she might not be the original Star, the one who went first into the wand. Had others failed? Had she fought them, defeated them? Would she remember, or would it even matter? Hexenuss, the witch, the nut that would not crack. The thought of so many Stars fighting, rending each other, dying alone in pools of blood. That's not real, is it? It cannot be real, no more than the stars she sees fight reflected in the creature's unfathomable, dark eyes.

I am Hexenuss, and she is me. The nut that would not crack.

No.

Dip down. Dip down, Star. Dip down deep.

You are the Star that's here, and that's the only Star that matters.

Dip down, hold your breath and dip down.

She gasps and struggles, thinks to herself, I can't breathe.

And then, all at once, the universe is not.

 

When Star returns to the world, she does so gasping for air that she cannot remember ever having tasted before but knows she craves desperately. She sits up, struggling, and feels slim, strong arms around her. Marco. Marco. Rest on that, Star, she tells herself. Marco is here and real and you can feel him hold you.

"Jeez, chick. We thought we'd lost you." It's not Marco, this time, but Janna. She leans against Star's bed, flipping a coin that she believes herself to have enchanted with a spell from the Book of Shadows Star got her last Christmas. She might have, for all Star knows. She's not as familiar with the subtle magics of Earth as she is Mewni's more colorful thaumaturgy.

"Sweet jumping Mewni rabbits, I thought I was gone, too," Star says. She blinks, raises a hand to make sure that the fingers are all still there (and, a nasty voice creeps through her brain, all still hers and not... the name slips away but the memory's ghost lingers dark, hot and hateful). "What the heck happened to me?"

Marco has still not recovered. He just clings to her, tears of relief wet against the pale skin of her neck--gonna be a lil' soggy, later, but the thought's nice--so it falls to Janna again to explain. As expected, the story raises as many questions as it answers.

"So we were all just sorta playing with my new Ouija board--"

"The thing like a Mewni board?" Star asks.

"Yeah, except it doesn't have a cage on it for catching anything you conjure up. Which, in retrospect, might be a design flaw."

"A design flaw?"

"Well, yeah," Janna says. "We called up Mackie Hand's spirit for a few minutes, but he and Marco got super boring about some karate junk so I sent him away. I tried to get that dreamboat John Keats but he just wouldn't play at all, so then we decided to talk to one of your grandmas--Solaria or something."

"The Monster-Carver," Star says. "She was so super cool."

"So yeah. I wanted to talk to your other grandma--Eclipsa, the one who ran of with her totally hot monster-demon thingy boyfriend, but you were all, 'no, it'll open up a portal into the Abyss, and blah blah blah,' and so we tried to talk to Lady Swords-a-lot instead."

"Did we manage it?"

"Kinda-sorta maybe? The board started shaking, and then it started smoking, and then a really dark cloud sort of... wafted out of your closet."

"My secrets closet, right?"

"If that was in there... you have got some deep, dark depths that I seriously envy. Anyway, it came out, sort of hung there in the air, and then started growing. You jumped up and told us to get behind you, but then it just, like, disappeared and you flopped like a dead girl."

"Yeah." Marco finally manages to disentangle himself from her and say. "Yeah... we really thought you were a goner. I even started CPR."

"Oooh, so that's why my ribs feel sorta... creaky," Star says. "I thought I hit em on the way down."

"Nah, he was jamming em good," Janna says. "So anyway, you were out for a couple of minutes and then, poof!" She mimes a magical explosion with her hands. "You were right back and here we are with you being confused, me explaining like a boss and Marco crying and getting you all wet."

It hadn't felt like a few minutes, though, Star reflects. It had seemed like years... wherever, she went. Decades. A lifetime. She can't express that, though, that she had lived, died, rotted and been reborn. They would not understand, had no frame of reference for understanding. One cannot fathom it, the ghost of a memory she wants to draw to her and push away all at once, without having confronted it. And she would not wish that on her worst enemy, let alone two of her closest friends on earth.

So she pasts on her brightest Star Butterfly smile, lets her blush stickers shine as gleaming hearts and says, "Yeah, it probably ran away when I flashed my wand. The thought of a good ol' raspberry Panzerfaust has that effect on... er, whatever it was."

"Yeah," Marco says. "That has to be it. Nothing can stand up to one of those, right?"

"Prezactly," Star says. It's what he needs to hear--what she needs to hear, for that matter. But she cannot be sure, really, if this is her room, if these are her friends, her arms, her legs, even her own pulse thrumming at the sides of her throat. Wouldn't the surest way to defeat her for that drifting, ragged, shadow, to make her think that she had--somehow--defeated it?

She forces the thought from her mind, replaces it with two winged armadillos dancing at her wedding. That's a good path, she thinks, a path she can live with. She's here, with her friends, with Marco, and this is her room, her hands, her feet and her armadillos. Down the other road lies madness.

But she can't escape, however hard she tries, that shadows seem a little darker at the corners of the room. Some nuts can be so hard to crack.


End file.
